Essay written by EC Malta student Eugenie Yarochenko

The lecture about dreams and their analysis was presented by A.Pisani, an Integrative Counsellor and Gestalt Psychotherapist. She is an independent practitioner who treats people with problems like grief and loss, depression, dissatisfaction, isolation, alienation and communication problems. The origin of this world is latine “dreme“ which means “joy” and “music”. She organized her speech in 3 parts: the types of dreams, the historical aspects and general dream facts.

Firstly, she explained that dreams, nightmares, healing dreams, prophetic dreams, signal dreams, epic dreams, progressive dreams and mutual dreams. I use to have ludic dreams because I stay conscious that I am dreaming what’s why I can more or less control it.

Secondly, she introduced some important historical key figures like Jung, Freud and F.Pearls. She stated for the first one that he had created a symbol representation of dreams placing it in different categories: persona, shadow, anima, divine child, wise old man/woman, great mother, Trickster and archetypal dreams. Unfortunately, I could not find my category following each description.

Then she described Freud’s work on dreams using information from his famous book named “The interpretation of dreams”. She highlighted that his interpretation is mostly turned to a sexual side of the dreamer. He reacted the concert of the latent and content manifestations. Into it, he categorized 3 distinct parts: Superego, Id, Ego of our mind and he associated dream images in 5 processes: displacement, projection, symbolization, condensation, rationalization. I thing I am someone who use the rationalization, when you try to find self-justifying reasons for your actions or thoughts.

Finally she spoke about F. Perls who is the founder of Gestalt (1893/1970). His work opposes previous thoughts. In fact, he looked primarily at human’s energy in the present time and he rejected that dreams are part of a universal symbolic language; for him every character and object in a dream represents one aspect of the dreamer.

To finish, she pointed out which some interesting dream facts and picked up some impressive information. For example, we sleep for 1/3 of our life, means about 6 years or 2100 days approximately. Moreover, everybody dreams, but toddlers don’t dream about themselves. Furthermore, our brain waves are increasing when we are dreaming but 10 min after have woken up we lose 90% of the dream content. I noticed as well that women are more susceptible to have a “déjà vu” (French expression)